Pilot held 50-minute conference call mid-flight before jet crashed onto the runway
The pilot had to make a split-second decision
There's been another aviation disaster in 2025, with a fighter pilot apparently holding a nearly hour-long conference call with ground engineers in hopes of stopping his F-35 jet from crashing into the runway.
It's been an unlucky year for the aviation industry, with some calling out an alarming number of crashes and fatalities. While everyone made it off American Airlines 1006 by climbing onto the wings as it caught fire in Denver, and everyone miraculously survived Delta Connection Flight 4819 landing upside down in Toronto, not everyone has been so lucky, There were no survivors when a Black Hawk helicopter collided with American Airlines Flight 5342, followed by even more fatalities when just one person made it out of the catastrophic Air India 171 crash alive.
You only have to look at the power of a fighter jet to see how deadly a crash involving one can be, just like when 2002's Sknyliv air show disaster saw 77 people lose their lives and a further 543 get injured.
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Thankfully, a major crisis was largely averted when an F-35 pilot safely parachuted to the ground as his $200 million jet was turned into a fireball on the runway.
In a crash report obtained by CNN, Lockheed Martin engineers tried for nearly an hour to talk the pilot through the problem with his jet before he was forced to eject.
The January 28 crash at Alaska's Eielson Air Force Base went viral on social media when shocking footage of the explosion started doing the rounds.
An Air Force investigation highlights ice on the hydraulic lines of the jet's nose and landing gear as the cause of the crash. This supposedly stopped the landing gear from retracting, so when the pilot tried to lower it again, it wouldn't center and locked to the left. Swooping close to the air base, he then engaged in the 50-minute call.
The report says that when the pilot and the engineers attempted to fix the problem, the jet thought it was on the ground and became 'uncontrollable' when it entered its 'automated ground-operation mode'.
When inspecting the wreck, it was found that around a third of the fluid in the malfunctioning hydraulic systems consisted of water. In theory, there shouldn't have been any.
Apparently, there has been a similar icing issue discovered in a different F-35 at Eilson just nine days before, although that jet was able to safely land.
Lockheed Martin had warned about potential problems with F-35 sensors and further guidance issues in an April 2024 newsletter.
Supposedly, referring to the newsletter means "[engineers] likely would have advised a planned full stop landing or a controlled ejection instead of a second touch-and-go" which is blamed for causing the jet to crash.
The Air Force’s Accident Investigation Board concluded that “crew decision-making including those on the in-flight conference call," and a lack of "oversight for the hazardous material program,” that deals with the storage and distribution of hydraulic fluid is are joined by not following proper aircraft hydraulics servicing procedures in contributing to the accident.